All Texts Are Political

by David Holper

I spent a couple of hours looking for the perfect article on the web to explain this, but I couldn't find it. I'm sure it's out there, but apparently, though this idea can be found in myriad texts, there was no one text that was focused solely on this topic.

So here it is: All texts are political.

What does this mean exactly?

It means that when an author crafts a story, she is doing it with a particular understanding of the world in terms of gender, history, language, and ultimately, all these things have to do with power--the power to assert a way of being, the power power to challenge conventional ways of being, the power to persuade, the power to cause assent to existing social structures.

When we as readers encounter these texts, we are, in a sense, being indoctrinated into the author's worldview. Typically, before we examine the texts more thoroughly, we may find ourselves reacting to the text on an unstated level. For instance, many of us have been swept away by a text into a world that we find far more compelling than our own. For some of us, these texts involved other worlds or definitely adventures far beyond the mundane limits of our day-to-day experiences. Also, we may have encountered texts that repelled us: texts that not only did not correspond with our understand of the world but may have even challenged our understanding to the degree of discomfort that we did not want to read further.

Regardless, texts are never neutral, nor should our understanding of them be so.

Consider, for instance, a story that we're all familiar with, The Wizard of Oz. Aside from the political allegory that Frank L. Baum clearly intended, the text posits an understanding of the world in terms of character types. Dorothy, who is honest and good, triumphs over all adversaries, including the Munchkins, who are somewhat indifferent to her, being themselves afraid of further political or military engagement with outside forces; the Witch, who is obviously evil; the Wizard, who is a patent humbug, i.e., an utter fake; and various other peoples and forces along the way. With all comers, she is able to either create allies or to overcome enemies. At the heart of this understanding of character is that Dorothy's purity of heart, honesty, and kindness can undermine and topple political and militaristic authority, even if that authority is bristling with power and malice toward her.

Beyond this, however, we might fairly easily deconstruct the story from a feminist angle. For instance, we might note that women in this text are either pure of heart (as are Dorothy and Glinda, the good witch) or they are evil crones, as are the witch sisters. In contrast, males figures tend to be false representations of power, such as the Cowardly Lion, the Wizard, etc. Men can play useful roles in this narrative, but only as assistants to Dorothy, and even then, their power derives from kindness to her, concern for her well-being, or defense of her (as helpless maiden). All real magic and power are invested in the female figures, for good or ill.

At its heart, the story seeks to persuade us to believe in a certain way of being, which we might describe as feminine, altruistic, gentle, honest, and plain—for, after all, Dorothy is nothing exceptional, in that she is a farmgirl from Kansas. Yet what seems ordinary, in our world, becomes extrordinary in Baum's imaginary one.

Such analysis can easily be applied to any text: The trick is to think about what the author's worldview is attempting to get you, the reader, to understand and buy into. Along with this, you must remember to look for where power resides in the social structure the author describes—and what the narrator's and/or protagonist's relationship is to that power. Never assume that the author is neutral, for she is not: At the heart of every text, the author writes with the attempt to convince us of something. It is that something that we both must understand and weigh carefully. And to do that means that we must measure the text against our own beliefs and ways of understanding. It is in this process that we both stretch our own view of the world to embrace ideas that we have not yet encountered; that we resist those ideas that we find abhorrent; that we come into contact with ideas that challenge our own—and in so doing, we become more than readers: we become active participants in building that text.